After 3 years of sticking with Novell, I recently switched away from openSUSE to Debian. There are a few reasons why, but I won't bore you with them. So far I'm liking it. There are a few things to set up before I settle in, and one is slow DNS lookup.

Install bind of course. The package is called bind9 and installs itself as a service and starts automatically, no need to mess with runlevels:

# aptitude install bind9

The config for bind in Debian is a subdirectory structure in /etc/bind. For a simple caching-only server, you leave /etc/bind/named.conf untouched and instead change /etc/bind/named.conf.options to have your forwarders: